Living on the Treadmill of Fear.

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

“Questers of the truth, that’s who dogs are; seekers after the invisible scent of another being’s authentic core.”

If you are watching closely you can see your life change. If you look even more closely you can see it coming before it arrives. I favor the second. This is one of the curious mysteries of life. We should know that things are going to happen to us. They happen to everyone else. How does it serve that some variation of these countless themes will not happen to each and every one of us? I should add that just because I favor the second approach, I am not a trained professional. In any case, the first method leads directly to the second, automatically, as the result of paying attention.

Of course, there are people who pay way too much attention to the minutiae of things that haven't happened yet and maybe never will. They obsess over negative possibilities. We call these people neurotics. Then there are those whose whole attention is focused on what they can get away with doing to other people. We call them psychotics. Of course, they're a little more nuanced than that. Then there are those who are motivated to act out on those things that drive a neurotic batshit and they're called compulsives. Compulsives do what they do because they think that particular set routines will protect them from things happening to them, which they don't. Technically they are called obsessive compulsives. They are not to be confused with impulsives, who are usually acting out to relieve stress. It all comes down to anxiety and stress, which are the result of a fear based existence. They like to say that all of these are caused by chemical imbalances. Why do 'they' say this? They say this because the pharmaceutical companies lean on them to say it. The actual cause, generally, in my opinion, is the result of not being able to successfully integrate into a diseased society.

You can't fit into this culture unless you are willing to be bent out of shape. Once you are bent out of shape you develop any one or more of these psychological problems. They are a rite of passage. I'm aware that I was all too brief in my description of the defining characteristics of the various maladies but you can educate yourself at your leisure. All the violence being carried out by the system on the systematized; all the suicides and much higher amount of what doesn't get seen as suicide but which is suicide; it's all a product of the forced regimentation of human behavior, in the service of the conscienceless predators. It is almost laughable that people, en masse, would put up with it... but they do.

I've never put up with it but I've paid the price, as have all of us who insist on going our own way. It's a personal decision. You have to decide for yourself if you are okay with living on The Treadmill of Fear in return for whatever presumed quality of life you are going to be getting out of that. Hear that dial tone? My phone is off the hook about it. Here's something I learned and you can go to the third hexagram of the I Ching for the answer. It explains what you run into in the initial stages. I can vouch for that. It can be brutal but (also from the I Ching) 'perseverance furthers'. Unfortunately, most people don't have the sand or the determination to get to that place of enduring freedom. One of the problems is that it is not an external location and only turns into one when the internal light goes on. Then instead of living in this prison world you could be in prison and be freer than those on the outside. I had direct experience of this at one point and it blew my mind. I had people coming to visit me when I was locked up and they were often in sad shape. Meanwhile I was in bliss.

When I got out of lockdown, I had been in for 20 months during that period and I was lighter than air. Everywhere I went, I could see the ingrained misery of the people around me. I was in a state of intense hyper reality. I had been meditating for hours each day in my cell. It was hard to believe that I was seeing what I was seeing. After a couple of months that awareness went away for the most part and I didn't notice it as much. You get played back into the whole dreamscape. It just happens.

A classic example of this is when you watch TV. At first you are aware that you are watching it. You can see the absurdity, maybe... a lot of people don't even have that. Or say you are in a theater and you are watching a movie. You know that you are watching a movie but within a few minutes you lose that objective awareness and for all general purposes you are in the film or the TV show. This happens all day long because life itself is a movie. Most of the time for most people, the objective and consciously reflective awareness is not in operation. For others, it comes and goes. For the liberated, they are nearly always aware of the circumstances of their existence, except when they don't want to be.

I used to watch Guru Bawa. He would sit up in his room on the second floor of the Overbrook Fellowship, on mainline Philadelphia and the TV was playing all the time. I'd watch him watching the people while they were watching TV and I could see that he was working on them, while they were being distracted by the television. I had an amusing experience one day. This fellow, Michael Quinn, had been listening to me play some of my songs and, for whatever the reason, he was much moved by them. At the time, music, singing and dancing, were considered a no no. I always found this strange because Bawa was a Sufi and they have Sufi Dancing and other things but... I digress.

Anyway, Michael was one of those real mover and shaker kind of guys. He later became a multi millionaire from buying mansions in an extremely cheap housing market and then restoring and selling them. Later on we had a big falling out over a young lady named DJ, with whom I was having a romantic liason and that, I'm pretty sure, put the kiss of death on our relationship. Anyway, he was motivated to go right to Guru Bawa and tell him about my songs and how I should be allowed to put them out there. So... Bawa sends for me and I am seated in front of him and he gives me the standard lecture about music. He had this way of looking into the palm of his hand at certain moments when he was talking to you. It had something to do with reading your life. Then, out of the blue he says, “Okay, you can do this. You go out and do this but you come back when you have done this, okay?' I said, “okay.” The funny part is that while he was saying this to me, one of those commercials that were always coming on in that time period was playing and it was for Sergio Franchi's greatest hits. I was super aware of the irony going on.

The result of our get together spread like wildfire through the fellowship and before you knew it, some significant number of the residents were all banging on Bawa's door, looking to get the same permissions, which they did not get. It was pretty hilarious and only added to the degree of resentment I had to deal with there every day. It was such an event that he had to give a whole discourse about it, which involved a story about a king sending out through the kingdom for musicians (for some reason) and the result was that everyone was playing at once and it was cacophony. I don't remember how it ended, it was a long time ago.

Bawa was fairly prescient about things. He knew where various lifestyles would lead people, regardless of the hopes and ambitions of the people who want to go in any of those directions. It's funny how we rationalize what we want to do and who we want to be, in such a way as to convince ourselves that it is all on the up and up. I look back on my life and the intensity of effort I put into realizing my dreams, which never, or have yet to come to pass and I recognize now that I was spared a whole lot of bullshit and grief. All things in time and all things, more importantly, at the right time and in the right way. Otherwise it is a very slippery slope. I've looked right at it and seen that. I got a few famous friends who are dead now. They had it all, so to speak... but they did not have it all apparently and now they are in that far country from which they say no traveler returns but they do return. They return over and over and over again.

If you look at older people you will see those characteristics they developed over a lifetime of patterning. These are the things that came about in their attempts to deal with what life threw at them and the compromises they made. In many of their homes the lights are on all the time and the TV and radio are both playing at the same time. There's a reason for this and it has to do with getting to the further end of The Treadmill of Fear. It comes from having built a small prison for themselves within the confines of the larger prison that was built for them. I'm looking out my window at the wet jungle (it's been raining on and off for a week at least) and I wonder how it could be better than this. There's no one around and the only sounds are those of the wild life singing in concert with the atmosphere of their world. They're not on the radio or the TV but they should be.

I'll close on an amusing note. One of the readers here went off on an escapade to see if he could convince a certain few individuals to make peace with me. One of the people he talked to; I believe it was a woman, went on and on about all my sins and failings but also betrayed that she was up on every single thing I write, every radio broadcast I do and every comment everyone else makes but... she doesn't like me at all (grin). So, why is she around all of the time? It does make you wonder what that means but... in my case, I don't wonder long.

It's perfectly okay not to like someone. We are as much defined by our enemies as we are by our friends. We all have shortcomings and they will be called to our attention here and there but... there is no reason to lie and make things up, or create inflated exaggerations that bear no resemblance to real life. The truth should be enough. It should be. Maybe it's not.


End Transmission.......